The page 1 story in today's Dispatch deals with Attorney General of Ohio Marc Dann and his admitted affair with a female staff member. After reading the article, and the several short articles concerning the same issue, something was made clear to me: The Dispatch either knows for certain that Dann was sleeping with his scheduler Jessica Utovich, or they think they have the evidence to support that claim.
The lead says "Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann admitted yesterday that he had an affair with a young female staff member[...]" Later in the article , the focus turns to whether Utovich spent the night at Dann's Dublin condo. The Dispatch also printed transcripts of interviews from April 22 and 30 between Dann and and former state sen. Ben Epsy. The transcripts also focused on whether or not Utovich spent the night at Dann's Dublin condo. Here's the link to the story and the side stories: http://www.dispatchpolitics.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2008/05/03/AG_REPORT.ART_ART_05-03-08_A1_BTA3LJQ.html?adsec=politics&sid=101
Is the Dispatch beating around the bush? How do you feel the issue was covered in general.? Is this a story that needed so many side stories, or could suspicions be put to rest if the Dispatch simply asked Dann if he was sleeping with Utovich?
2 comments:
I am fairly certain that the lead reporters -- Alan Johnson and James Nash -- were hearing things on background or off the record that they were trying to get on the record. As you can see from today's story (Sunday, May 4), the first reports of sexual harassment were reported to Human Resources six months before they were published in the Dispatch. Typically, Johnson and Nash would have done their reporting (i.e. interviews), fact checking, public records research et al. and then confronted the AG with what they had learned. I would suspect that he would have declined an answer to your bottom-line question: "Were you having an affair with an office worker?" Especially since he even evaded the answer in a sworn statement to not-so-specific questioning by lead investigator assistant AG Ben Espy. Dann didn't admit the affair until the very day Espy publically revealed the results of the AG probe. Sunday's Dispatch story did report that Dann had been romantically linked to an office worker who had resigned and named the worker.
Mike: You ought to read this link to Editor Ben Marrison's blog post on Pajamagate:
http://blog.dispatch.com/blog-36/
Post a Comment